The Full Catastrophe (20 page)

Greek thinkers were thereafter charged with promoting a national identity that suited the image in which the country had been created: a fusion of Hellenism and Orthodox Christianity. They often fortified national unity by amplifying the wretchedness and injustice Greeks suffered under Ottoman rule, and in the decades following independence, school curricula were
shaped accordingly. The Ottoman period—the
Tourkokratia,
as it is known—was depicted as a centuries-long interruption in the eternal progress of the enduring Greek nation. All one needed to know about it was that the Greeks were cruelly enslaved for centuries before the nation was liberated and restored to its rightful Hellenic dominion. What else about it could be worth knowing?

One example from my mother’s childhood education indicates how young Greeks have long been educated on the subject. In a school play audition, she tried out for the role of a Greek beauty, clad in the national colors of blue and white, who attracts the interest of a young Turkish pasha dressed in black breeches and a fez. My mother, the maiden, does not respond well to his flirtatious glances.

“Young, frightened Greek, proud virgin, what did I do to you for you to look at me with teary eyes?” the Turk says.

“How do you require me to look at you?” she replies. “With a smiling glance? You, pasha, who choked our memories with blood, and burned our little houses and all our nice things. And now our mothers cry. Our children cry with them.”

The pasha takes a few steps closer. His voice becomes more stern.

“Wed a Turk and you will see what wealth you’ll get. Among the Turks you’ll live, like the daughter of Ali Pasha!”

The honorable maiden is not tempted. She fearlessly raises her voice and replies: “My mother and my father would rather slaughter me than have their honorable daughter made into a Turk!”

The Turk is not touched by her brave righteousness. He draws his sabre.

“Why, take a look at this knife. If you don’t want me, it will be buried inside your heart, and your soul will leave you at once!”

“Onward, thug! Slaughter me with a double-edged blade. My honor is to be slaughtered for my sweet country.”

The pasha mercilessly lurches at her and digs the blade into
her bosom. My mother drops to her knees. She takes her last patriotic breaths before plopping entirely to the ground.

“I was thin then. I could fall easily,” my mom said nearly six decades later, after recalling the performance for me.

She, like many Greek children until today, was taught that the Ottomans forbade Greek youths from learning how to read and write Greek. The young, therefore, would sneak off under the cover of night to underground “secret schools” in churches and monasteries. There, under candlelight, a priest would not only teach them the language and the faith, but inculcate them with the enduring flame of Hellenism and the Enlightenment. Pretty much everyone in Greece can recite the nursery rhyme about the secret schools, normally sung to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”:

My little bright moon,

shine on my footsteps,

so that I can go to school,

to learn to read and write,

to learn God’s teachings.

The secret-school story is taught to the children of the diaspora too. On Long Island in the 1980s, when my brother and I regularly attended religion and language classes at a Greek Orthodox Church, he played a secret-school priest in a church play. There, on the indoor basketball court that served as the church’s social gathering place, he sat on a stool, dressed in a frock, miming the practice of passing on God’s teachings to the boys and girls gathered around him as other children recited poems about Turkish oppression into a microphone.

There is one complication concerning the secret-school story, however. There is no evidence the schools ever existed, contemporary Greek scholars now point out. Indeed, there would be no
reason for them to exist. While non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire suffered discriminatory treatment and were subject to heavy, unfair taxes, Christians and Jews, considered “People of the Book,” were afforded the right to practice their religion. Despite the abuses Greeks suffered under Ottoman rule—the conversion of the patriarchal basilica of Constantinople, Hagia Sophia, into a mosque, remains one key sore point—the Orthodox Church was given considerable power to rule over its flock and educate the young. In fact, it was not uncommon for church hierarchs to praise the empire for protecting Christian Orthodoxy from the unholy influence of the Catholic West. Later, when the Greek revolution broke out, the leader of the Orthodox Christians, Ecumenical Patriarch Grigorios V, condemned the rebel leaders and decried the revolt. The Ottomans nevertheless hung the patriarch on Easter Sunday for failing to safeguard Orthodox Christians’ loyalty to the empire; he was later dubbed a Greek
ethnomartyras,
a national martyr. After Greece won its independence, its Bavarian king, Otto, decided it would not be a good idea for his Orthodox Christian subjects to remain under the authority of the patriarch in Ottoman-controlled Istanbul. So, in 1833, his regency declared the creation of the autocephalous Church of Greece. Church and the new state were now closely aligned. As part of the nation-building effort, the secret-school story and others like it helped depict the clergy as having led the resistance against the Ottoman tyrants. The reality, however, was more complicated.

Another effort of the new Greek state to cultivate a Hellenic ideal included making the official language
Katharevousa
—a “purified,” archaizing form of Greek devised by the revolutionary thinker Adamantios Korais, meant to make the language more antique. Vernacular Greek would become the official language in the 1970s, but not before generations of children were forced to learn a painfully overformal version of their language in schools. There have, in addition, been many efforts to “Hellenize” things about Greece that weren’t particularly Hellenic. Village names
that did not sound Greek were changed. Other languages spoken in Greece were suppressed. (Boutaris, for example, has some Vlach ancestry—a population of people in northern and central Greece whose language, similar to Romanian, is disappearing.) Even the coffee was eventually Hellenized. When my parents were children, men at the
kafenio
would order “Turkish coffee.” By the time they grew old and went back to Greece to visit, people were ordering “Greek coffee,” though it was the same stuff. Calling it Turkish coffee today might make strongly nationalistic Greeks angry—just as refuting the existence of the secret school could get you accused of being an apologist, a traitor, or, to use the phrase directed at Boutaris, a Turk lover.

With his invitation to Turks to visit Thessaloniki, Boutaris deeply upset the large number of Greeks who so enduringly revile Turkey that their animosity—like that in all lasting, national rivalries—is both carefully cultivated and accepted as an unquestionable, naturally occurring condition. Some Greek nationalists prefer not to mention Turkey by name, preferring to call it “the neighbor to the east.” Boutaris seemed to enjoy antagonizing such nationalist sentiment. Earlier in his life, he had suggested that the small street where Atatürk was born in Thessaloniki be named after the leader as a gesture to improve relations with Turkey. The idea was met with a fierce backlash. Rumors swirled that Boutaris wanted to rename the thoroughfare of St. Demetrios after the Turkish leader. Boutaris abandoned the street-naming idea by the time he ran for mayor, though many still revile him for it.

Atatürk in particular inspires deep resentment among Greeks for foiling the
Megali Idea,
or Great Idea, a longtime Greek aspiration to reclaim from the Turks the Byzantine territories of old, particularly Constantinople. After World War I, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and the Allies sought to partition it among themselves, Greek forces tried to realize the Great Idea by invading Anatolia. Turkish troops led by Atatürk, however, eventually beat back the Greeks. For Asia Minor’s Greek Orthodox Christians,
this was a disastrous result, as the Turks unleashed a spasm of retaliatory killings and expulsions. In the aftermath, the Greek and Turkish governments formalized a population exchange, based on religious affiliation. In the end, over one million Greek Orthodox Christians, many of whom spoke better Turkish than Greek, were expelled from Asia Minor and resettled in Greece. Smaller numbers of Muslims, many of whom spoke better Greek than Turkish, were expelled from Greece to the new nation of Turkey. Greeks refer to these events simply as “the catastrophe.” The Turks refer to the conflict as their war of independence. Since then, the two nations on several occasions have nearly gone to war. Conflicts erupted in the ’70s over the fate of the island nation of Cyprus—which has both Greek and Turkish populations, each faithful to its bigger-brother country; territorial water and airspace in the Aegean remain a source of perpetual dispute. After the outbreak of Greece’s debt crisis, right-wing politicians warned that Turkey would attempt to exploit Greece’s weakness to improve its position in the Aegean. The Greeks needed to remain vigilant against the threat, they argued. Boutaris, meanwhile, argued that closer ties with Turkey and its immediate neighbors would help ease Greece’s enormous financial troubles.

I first met Mayor Boutaris in Istanbul, several months after his inauguration, where he was visiting as part of his campaign to lure Turkish tourists. He was staying at the Ritz-Carlton, a guest of a local university that had invited him to speak at an academic conference on Turkish-Greek relations, and we met on the rooftop terrace late the night he arrived. The mayor was a sharp dresser with a fondness for suspenders and red socks while at the same time possessing some of the qualities of an aged rock star. He spoke with a low, hoarse drone and seemed a bit dazed. Deep lines
in his face suggested many years of hard partying. He smoked unfiltered Camel cigarettes almost continuously, as if his life depended on it. A blue-green lizard was tattooed below the thumb of his right hand, its tail running to the wrist—a reminder, he told me, of the reptile’s capacity to regenerate after injury. In addition to his other tattoos, the symbol for his astrological sign, Gemini, appeared on the middle and ring fingers of the same hand. The gold stud in his left ear, he told me, protected him from the evil eye, in accordance with Vlach tradition.

Boutaris had spent most of his life as a winemaker. He had inherited the family winery, which was founded by his grandfather in a mountain village just west of Thessaloniki in 1879, when the area was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Since that time, the region has been known for the sour black grapes that produce a dry red wine called Xinomavro. Boutaris is a recovered alcoholic who for the past two decades has tasted but not swallowed his own vintage. The family business—the Boutari Winery—at one point defaulted, Boutaris told me, and he used a considerable amount of his personal fortune to keep the company afloat, a financial hit from which he never fully recovered. He eventually left the company solely to his brother and started his own, smaller brand, called Kir-Yianni, which is now run by his son. The Boutari Winery, having recovered from those earlier financial troubles, today remains one of Greece’s most widely known wine brands. Boutaris was in the company of an aide in a fine suit, Antonis Kamaras, a towering former banker twice the mayor’s size, who was educated at the London School of Economics and saw it as his job to soften the mayor’s often blunt declarations into cohesive policy jargon. Kamaras’s father, a successful tobacco merchant, was a friend of Boutaris, and together, the merchant’s son and the mayor emitted an air of old aristocracy and somewhat faded wealth.

The terrace of the Ritz-Carlton looked out over the rippling Bosporus, the strait separating the European and Asian sides of
Turkey, its currents illuminated by streaks of city light. We found a table next to a three-piece band playing an assortment of Latin-flavored New Age music that seemed ill-fitting to our location in the world. Boutaris lit a cigarette and crossed his legs. At one point, a shapely woman wearing a short blue skirt and stiletto heels walked past the table. It seemed like perhaps she had come to the hotel to fish for wealth, and the mayor seemed to be biting. His head swiveled as his gaze followed her path. He made an expression of what seemed like sincere pain, and then looked at Kamaras as if perhaps the aide could explain: Why do such lovely creatures exist, and why do they tempt me so? Kamaras tried to move on as gracefully as he could. “There are lots of leggy blondes here,” he said as he, too, crossed his legs and lit a cigarillo. “It’s safe to say we won’t be seeing many of those types during tomorrow’s academic conference.” Boutaris’s focus turned to the less immediately enticing subject of my interest, the reaction at home to his tourism campaign. “Thessaloniki was a booming city of the Ottoman Empire,” he told me in his invariably low-pitched voice. “It was a Jewish city, and a Turkish city.”

One may take these comments as simple fact considering that, at the same time Thessaloniki became part of Greece, Greeks were the smallest of the three groups. But to refer to Thessaloniki—originally founded three centuries before the birth of Christ and named after Alexander the Great’s half sister—as anything other than a Greek city is to the mayor’s detractors a provocation, just the kind of blasphemy that inspires convulsions of anger. Yet, until the city became part of an expanding Greece, Jews composed its largest religious community and referred to it in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) as
la madre de Israel,
a bit of information Greeks were never taught in high school history classes. As Boutaris put it: “They didn’t know because nobody told them.”

Thessaloniki’s Sephardim began arriving at the end of the fifteenth century after being forced out of Spain during the Inquisition.
They were welcomed by Ottoman authorities interested in repopulating the once thriving Byzantine city, whose Greek population had been decimated by the invading Ottomans decades earlier as punishment for resistance. During Ottoman rule, Thessaloniki became one of the largest Jewish population centers in the world and Ladino was heard in the bustling port more often than Greek or Turkish. When the city became part of Greece, Jews were unsure about the change, fearful their liberties would be curtailed by Greek authorities charged with the task of incorporating a large religious minority into a nation that questioned whether one could be both a Greek and a Jew at the same time. The Greek state nevertheless allowed Jews the self-autonomy they had enjoyed during the Ottoman Empire. Jewish schoolchildren learned Greek and swore allegiance to their new nation.